Of abilities and needs

"From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." So goes a popular dictum. What it emphasizes is the concern that while the strong may survive and do well, those who are weak must also be assisted to become strong. Without this value, a human society cannot endure. As a matter of fact, the human species itself cannot be sustained as humans are not born like flies, in no need of nurture and taking care of themselves after a few moments of drying their tiny wings.

Most societies historically have not been particularly humane. After several thousand years of being around, they continue to be afflicted by massive poverty and all the brutalizing conditions that it provokes. Until the last two hundred years, human rights meant at best so much rhetoric; most people failed to gain any material advantage from its discussion as only a tiny minority of society lived recognizably human lives. "People" tragically did not equate with "humans" and the better societies properly understood that their development necessitated transforming so many of their people into becoming the better species. In these humanizing societies, the preferred way of life has increasingly been guided by the principle "From each according to one’s abilities, to each according to one’s needs."

The Philippines has a long way to go in humanizing its people. Its politics and economics conspire in taking so much from its already impoverished masses and reserving this blood booty for its largely insensitive elites. Taxation is grossly regressive, income is greatly skewed. Filipino mansions are palatial enough to impress the world’s wealthiest people, even those who before the global economy took a dive earned more than a hundred dollars every second. Filipino hovels, on the other hand, are fully competitive with the worst to be found in Dakka or Calcutta.

For poor people, education is supposed to provide a way out of a Hobbesian existence, a life that is criminally "nasty, brutish and short." Popular belief in education is so strong that in survey after survey of Filipinos, their single biggest expense after food is associated with schooling – their own or their children’s.

Poor families even skimp on food in order that at least one of their members might finish at least high school. The willful hope is that this person will eventually become the entire family’s social security, a safety net working far more conscientiously and effectively than government’s GSIS and SSS in dealing with the family’s financial, educational, social, health and other needs.

In a humanizing society, education is of crucial importance and various systems are activated to ensure that most people are able to access it and do enjoy the material and spiritual advantages it brings. The poorer a family is, the greater the efforts exerted by such a society to assist its members towards having a gainful education.

Subsidized education is a regular feature of every progressive society, regardless of its developmental stage. Its public finance system collects resources for popular education, exacting individual contributions based on the principle of "from each according to one’s ability" and assigning benefits "according to one’s need."

The Philippines is a study in tragedy where this socialist strategy is concerned. Regressive taxation places the burden of resource collection on the poor. For most Filipinos, poverty adds a formidable obstacle to gaining eligibility to the heftiest benefits of public educational subsidies. Most people are unable to finish elementary education and therefore cut short their access to subsidized education. The pattern for the poor who somehow worked their way into high school is similar. Because of their urgent need to help their families eke an existence, they too eventually drop out.

Among the poor who miraculously finish high school, practically everyone had to attend substandard educational institutions, suffering poor instruction from normally grossly underpaid and all too often incompetent teachers.

With their largely paper diplomas, these poor high school graduates must compete for college subsidies with their counterparts from better-off families, graduates from better-endowed educational institutions with better academic programs and better-compensated, also understandably generally better mentors.

Add the final twist. To prepare for the competitive examinations that the most substantial public subsidies in college education require – for example, the University of the Philippines’ College Admissions Test or UPCAT – costly reviewer programs now proliferate and are practically mandatory for those who can afford them. An extra five or ten thousand peso expense makes sense for such people because the actual subsidy for a UP education may be realistically estimated to run as high as 85 percent, even for students who now are paying the university’s full tuition. (The UP authorities ought to undertake more serious studies of the extent of public subisidies enjoyed by UP students, especially for those from the materially best-off families. Simplistic estimates that do not include subsidies in the form of structural depreciation and gross faculty undercompensation are extremely misleading and understate the extent of overall public subsidy. Comparative cost analysis of college education for comparable state universities within the Asian region are also approprite. Among Asia’s prime universities, it is arguable that no quality college education can be effected with less than P150,000 being spent per student per year.)

Of course, for those who can’t afford the extra expense of reassuring reviewer courses, there is the consolation of comforting prayers. The comparative effectiveness of fervent prayers versus expensive reviewers and better material endowments is fully demonstrable in the campuses of the most sought after universities in the Philippines. In the UP’s most preferred campuses – in Diliman and in Padre Faura – the students’ most difficult challenge now may be neither mastring English nor Physics; it could be finding parking for their model cars. (In all fairness, the other UP campuses elsewhere in the country do provide legitimate rationales for a continuing public subsidy.)

Perversion has become the norm in this country. Like many other decent tenets, the socialist principle – from each according to one’s ability to each according to one’s need – has also been corrupted here. Doubletalk, doublespeak persists. Now, the wealthier and more powerful you are, the more public resources you expect and effectively get; the poorer and weaker you are, the less public assistance you can expect and you are truly never disappointed. The able are further enabled and the needy are pushed into greater and deeper need.

The mystery of course is why this condition has continued to date. Rational, historically-minded, patriotic analysts have long been drawing up Philippine landscapes where volcanoes are among the country’s most prominent features. To date, despite much anticipation and provocative stoking by these concerned analysts, neither purifying fire nor entombing lava has issued from their historically-configured social topographies.